Educated Gamer: Why Moral Choices Are a Myth

Excerpt

"It’s become a recent trend in games to inject some half baked ideas of morality or a moral consciousness into their games, mainly as a way to increase longevity; basically it’s just a cheeky way to get you to play the game twice to see the sickly sweet ‘good’ ending. The reality is there are no such things as moral choices in games because the game can be played again or reloaded to perform a ‘do over’. Sadly morality in games is often as messy in virtual worlds as it is the real, often I praised Mass Effect for having the bad speech options highlighted red and the good blue so I knew how to be evil, or good if I was feeling frivolous."
(BioShock, Culture, Industry, Mass Effect, PS3, Xbox 360)

A good idea for an article there, but the author didn't actually seem to reach any real point past: how can morality in games work? More time and words needed to be dedicated to this article, I feel.

For me, morality in games is a tricky thing. Most games throw in moral choices, but then very clearly sign-post "Good" and "Bad" choices, and then reward you for heavily for being good. I don't think that's all together bad, after all it works quite well for Mass Effect, although happily it never felt like it punished me for being bad.

The Witcher 2 did moral choices very well, I though. It presented a situation, and solutions to that situation, but never sat there and said, "that one is bad and that one is good". You just had choices, and it was up you to read the situation and choose what you deemed appropiate. There was no clear cut "good" and "bad", just choices.

Untrue - a freedom fighter attacks the perpetrators who are making a conscious and unfair decision to oppress them whereas terrorists attack both decision-maker and their people/civilians. Terrorism attacks innocents to prove a point, freedom fighting attacks only those who bear arms and prevent them directly from enjoying freedom (or those up the chain of command responsible.

Upholding sustainable utilitarianism and fairness of its application is a largely benevolent objective, and choices which work towards this are objective, and not subjective morality. There are indeed good and bad choices, but I'll agree that this isn't the case all the time (economics - austerity is not evil, just an alternative way to upping spending to escape a recession and debt.). What we need is more dragon age style choices, where your companions perceive you a certain way, rather than fable style extremes of good and evil.